Seroje: The Seeing Eye

Seroje lifted the gun with both hands and aimed. Her eyes stared downward, jittering across the firing range. The nine-millimeter pistol felt larger than she preferred. It was a loaner.

“No, you need to aim. Look through the sights of the gun,” the instructor said, using his hand to lift her chin.

That annoyed her. She didn’t need to have her head up to see the single target, a black shadow representing the upper torso of a man. Besides, it was a mere ten yards away, a distance where she found it impossible to miss.

“I got it,” she said, wishing the man would step back and stop touching her. This wasn’t her first time with a gun. She was a professional. Besides, she needed to get this over with quickly.

She let her eyes drop again, having already aimed.

“Eyes upward. Trigger finger alongside the gun until you’re ready to fire,” the instructor said, touching her hand to point out how he wanted her to hold the pistol.

His touch caused her to lose her aim.

“Back away,” Seroje said tersely. “I can’t fire with you right there. You’re right in the shell casing ejection path.”

“You need to get your form correct,” he said.

“Back away,” Seroje repeated in a low whisper. She knew she didn’t have to speak loudly since neither of them wore hearing protection. Her gun had a silencer. They were the only ones on the firing range.

The range had already closed for the evening. The staff were waiting for them to finish and leave.

Seroje heard the instructor sigh, but he took three steps back. She took that moment to aim. With just a slight raise of the gun, she had her target and fired twice.

Her shots hit the silhouette in the heart region.

She changed her aim and rapidly fired, alternating between the center of the forehead and the heart until she had fired the remaining fifteen shots in the magazine.

Seroje ejected the magazine and cocked the gun, showing there were no other shells loaded, since that was the protocol taught to her in the past. She then set the pistol down on the table along with the magazine.

She could see the instructor standing there, speechless. He stared at the target.

“I only needed to fire one full magazine, right?” Seroje said, already knowing the answer. She just wanted to poke at him a little. “To get my quota in for the week for work?”

“Yeah,” the man said in a quiet voice, still staring at the target.

Seroje pressed a button, and the target came to her. She pulled the paper target off the clips that held it and walked out of the firing range.

She felt fed up with all the formalities. And she still needed to sign the target and submit it to her boss as proof. It seemed childish.

Her shift at work started in an hour, and she still needed to go home and change. She hated being in a hurry, especially when it wasn’t her fault.

Outside, she started heading toward her car but then stopped dead. Someone had parked a cab right behind her.

“Sorry. Am I blocking you?” asked a voice.

Seroje watched a man wearing tattered jeans and a muscle shirt trot up to the cab. He held a kitten. “Stray,” he said. Then he got into the cab and drove off.

Seroje mused about the unusual sight of a cabbie rescuing a kitten until she got home. There, she let her mind play out the setup for the evening while she changed into a gray skirt and suit jacket with a white blouse, aiming to look like an office worker.

Something about the assignment was wrong.

She blew out a breath in exasperation while she grabbed her tools for the night and headed for her car. “I’m pretending to be an office worker who is pretending to be a hotel detective, while actually tailing Clive Daniel, some rich guy in a hotel.”

The entire scenario felt too elaborate. She had never pretended to be two different people at the same time. And according to her dossier, Clive Daniel wasn’t known for being especially observant.

Clive was a businessman, and there were some suspicions about his behavior violating his company’s code of ethics. Meaning, he might be hiring hookers. Seroje could easily follow him from the shadows and figure that out without the need for a cover at all.

Unfortunately, she had to do what her boss said. That was the job.

She drove to the parking garage across from the hotel, liking that she could park on the main level. As she walked into the lobby, her eyes took in every detail, but mostly she cared whether Clive was in view.

He was not.

Seroje checked in with the hotel manager, Patel, who wore a well-fitted dark suit. This hotel served wealthy vacationers, requiring every staff member to wear a clean and neat uniform.

“You want me in the lounge on the second floor above the lobby?” she asked, confirming his request.

He merely nodded. She didn’t think he cared much for her. Also, she didn’t know if he was aware of the real reason she was there.

That wasn’t something she would discuss anyway, so it didn’t matter. She turned and trotted up to the lounge, where she settled in on a tan sofa. She’d expected the area to be empty, and it was.

With care, she took out a laptop from her briefcase, along with several empty file folders, to create the facade of an office worker catching up on work.

She even included an empty soda can, to make it look like she had been there a while.

Her eyes took in the two wooden end tables at each end of the sofa. On each table rested a lamp with swirling black designs. Two tan, overstuffed chairs, facing each other, squared off the furnishings of the lounge.

She found it sterile, yet pleasing.

A wide hallway swept in both directions from the lounge, and she knew it encircled the entire hotel. She had walked it to make sure on a previous night. To her left, stairs led down to the main lobby.

This location gave her a great view of the area and foot traffic. It also allowed her to hear voices from below, chatter and laughter from people partying in the hotel bar and the lobby.

However, the only conversation she could follow was that of a man with a deep voice, talking nonstop about his dogs. Seroje figured he must be sitting near the stairs, which allowed his voice to rise to her.

She found him dull.

All these details flooded Seroje’s senses. Her hazel eyes, unfocused and jittery, captured every detail around her like a camera filming.

Every sound she heard, she analyzed. Two women walked along the hall toward her, a man walking behind them. People kept chattering down below. Her nose caught a whiff of someone’s aftershave. Her ass told her the sofa cushions were too hard.

The two women power-walked past her, stirring up a small piece of paper on the floor that caught Seroje’s attention. It was out of place, and something about the color of the stationery looked vaguely familiar.

She fought the urge to rise and pick it up. She shouldn’t move. So she just breathed, letting the urge pass.

She took no more notice of the women, since they were of no concern to her. However, to expend the energy she’d been holding in, she curled some of her shoulder-length, strawberry blonde hair over her ear and out of her face.

She repeated this motion three times while she stared straight ahead. The empty can beside her seemed to taunt her. She wanted a soda.

The time was ten forty-five p.m.

Seroje glanced at a man who was walking down the hall behind the women. Not the man she needed to look for. But to her annoyance, he sat in the chair to her right to make a phone call.

Seroje found him attractive, but she wasn’t here for that.

She guessed he was in his late thirties, considering he had some gray in his brown hair. He had beautiful, brown eyes. His dark suit looked expensive and well tailored, which matched the opulence of the hotel. He seemed toned and fit.

However, it was obvious he wasn’t here on holiday.

“No one showed up,” she heard him say, making her think he had called his office about a customer who hadn’t appeared. “Am I at the right hotel?”

Seroje gave no indication that she was aware of him. He was of no concern to her.

The man talking about his dogs downstairs must have walked away, because she no longer heard him. All the conversations in the lobby and bar were now nothing but background static, easy for her to tune out.

Two male hotel employees, dressed smartly in their red uniforms, trotted up the stairs with purpose.

As soon as they were far enough away from the stair landing, they stopped, pulling out cigarettes and using a soda can for their ashes. The hotel prohibited smoking within the building.

Seroje typed on her laptop, sending an alert to Patel. Her facade of being a hotel detective meant she had to spy on employees and report on their misconduct.

It was a menial job, and it interfered with her real objective. Nobody matching Clive’s description had come by yet, and her time here was already half finished. But she couldn’t go looking for him, because she wasn’t supposed to move.

Seroje half wondered if her boss had set her up.

Patel walked up the stairs, looking stern. He slid his phone into a pocket. It seemed he had just read her alert. His dark eyes spied the two employees, and he approached them.

The two men flinched, putting out their cigarettes in the soda can, starting to make excuses. Patel hushed them and walked them away toward a back staircase. More than likely, he would fire them.

The man in the chair ended his call and made another. This call sounded as if he was breaking up with a girlfriend. “Look, I can’t make you happy, and you’re not making me happy,” he said in a quiet voice.

He sat very still as he listened on his phone for almost ten minutes. “You’re still not making me happy. I think that’s all we can do. Bye.”

Yes, Seroje felt pretty sure he had just broken up with a girlfriend. She wondered if that was why he’d sat near her—to pick up another. She didn’t have time for that. But he was attractive.

Seroje really wanted to move around to try to locate Clive. But her boss had been very explicit in his instructions. She was to remain in the lounge, either for the allotted time or until Clive appeared.

Another male hotel employee walked through the lounge, followed by a maid. They both stopped dead when they saw the dark-suited man.

This caught Seroje’s attention. They were clearly eyeing him and not her.

They walked backward, and she heard a mutter from one: “He’s at the wrong hotel.”

“Someone fucked up,” the other agreed.

Seroje stared at them. As soon as they noticed her attention, they spun and ran.